Microsoft's secret of success

Gaufire may have criticized Microsoft for a number of reasons recently, but the truth remains that it is a household name, and probably when you would want to consider the computing era on the whole, it will always have a significant place there. The story ofBill Gates is a very inspiring one, considering to have started with zilch and now the brain behind a multi-billion dollar company.

He may well have been dethroned as the richest man in the world by his good friend Warren Buffet, but his fame as the man who revolutionised the OS on our computer systems cannot be, in any way be lessened. As Bill Gates prepares to end his full-time work at Microsoft, he tells the BBC in an interview that it wasn't just what Microsoft did, but what his rivals didn't do that let Microsoft get ahead.

"Most of our competitors were very poorly run," he tells Fiona Bruce, for The Money Programme.
"They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together. They did not understand how to go around the world."

Sir Alan Sugar, one of Britain's computer pioneers with his Amstrad range, testifies to Microsoft's global mobility even as a comparatively small company in the 1980s.
Amstrad, in Brentwood, Essex, was visited by a Microsoft salesman - or "mid-Atlantic smoothie" as Sir Alan describes him - who came to sell Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system.

Sir Alan declined, telling the salesman he was quite happy with the rival DR-DOS system from Digital Research for his new computer, explaining that "we're a consumer electronics manufacturer here, we're not a bunch of geeks, we don't give a sh**".

But the Microsoft man wouldn't take no for an answer, and "was constantly coming back each day" to the Amstrad offices, Sir Alan says, until a deal was done

For the whole interview, with the video, click here to view the whole article on the bbc website.

Publish Your Post here
Join GaufireTechForum